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Reflections

Category: Cycles and Seasons

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Gifts of the Winter God

My teaching days were filled with good energy and a sense of exploration.  I love teaching this program and the women who participate so freely and joyfully.  The focus of this session was visual art and the first day we explored “gush art” and art journaling methods, using clay and drawing materials in a free and spontaneous way to express what is stirring inside of us.  The second day we focused on images of God and “letting God out of the box” and making a triptych (out of a shoebox) and collage materials to create an altar for the sacred images that

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Winter Solstice

I discovered this wonderful reflection by Ron Rolheiser at Antony’s blog: Coming to the Quiet. During my last years of seminary training, I attended a series of lectures given by a prominent Polish psychologist, Casmir Dabrowski, teaching at the time at the University of Alberta. He had written a number of books around a concept he called “positive disintegration.” Positive disintegration. Isn’t that an oxymoron? Isn’t disintegration the opposite of growth and happiness? It would seem not. A canon of wisdom drawn from the scriptures of all the major world religions, mystical literature, philosophy, psychology, and human experience tells us that the journey to

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Holy Darkness

When we moved to Seattle the winters became more pronounced.  I didn’t think moving 600 miles north would make such a difference, but we easily have three hours more darkness in the winter than when we lived in Northern California.  It also feels more perceptible because the sky is often gray and the sun that much lower on the horizon as it makes her gentle arc across a winter sky. In contrast then, summer days are also much longer.  Days are filled with light in long expanses.  And while summers can indeed be beautiful here in the Northwest (of course anytime

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Advent Resources

Classes are canceled across Seattle today, my husband got the phone call at 5:00 a.m. notifying him (he teaches high school) and Seattle University posted their announcement soon after.  Apparently even though there hasn’t been much snowfall in the city, the low temperatures have made for icy and dangerous driving conditions.   Snow and below freezing temperatures are unusual around here and the city is not equipped to deal well, especially since Seattle is built on 7 hills, which makes for even more treacherous driving. Today was to be my last class session and I am sad not to have a chance to gather

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Waters of New Birth

Painting is “Waters of Baptism” by Tim Mooney Tim audited a class I co-taught while living in Berkeley.  A good friend and I received a grant from the Practicing Our Faith people to teach a class on creativity as Christian spiritual practice (you can read a summary here) in the spring of 2003.  It was a great experience, and we got to meet wonderfully creative and spiritually grounded students like Tim (a Presbyterian pastor, artist, and spiritual director) and begin exploring some of our ideas around creativity as a vital practice for church communities and ministry.  I got an email today from Tim,

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What Are You Birthing?

Advent begins next Sunday, the start of a new year in Christian calendars.  The word Advent comes from the Latin Adventus meaning coming.  It is a season of waiting with anticipation for the coming of Christ and the incarnation, God made flesh, culminating in the season of Christmas.   In Advent we are invited to be present to the tension between all of the not-yets of this world and the signs of the Kingdom we see here and now represented in Emmanuel, meaning God-with-us.  It is a tension between the promise we hope for and the glimmers of hope present at every turn.  Advent is a season

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Blessing the Bread

I just had to share two more things before I head to the airport.  I awoke early and so had time to discover a stunning post on Jen Lemen’s blog today about Love and another poem from Panhala, again by Lynn Ungar (according to Amazon her book is out of print, I think I need to make a point of finding a used copy): Blessing the Bread Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. Surely the earth is heavy with this rhythm, the stretch and pull of bread, the folding in and folding in across the palms,

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